The enormous outlay for overcrowded US federal prisons is forcing the White House to consider clemency and entreat non-violent, low-level felons serving terms for drug-related crimes to apply for early release.

Next week the US Bureau of Prisons will make the inmates aware of
the six criteria elaborated by the US Justice Department for
those who deserve early parole.

Those who want to go at large should conform to the following
criteria: have a clean prison record, have no history of
violence, possess no significant connections to gangs or other
criminal organizations, and have at least 10 years served in
prison.

First and foremost the amnesty is being prepared to repair
injustice for those who would have received considerably shorter
prison terms if they were put on trial today.

“These older, stringent punishments that are out of line with
sentences imposed under today's laws erode people's confidence in
our criminal justice system,” Deputy Attorney General James
Cole told AP.

The matter is that back in 2010 the Fair Sentencing Act
eliminated a five-year mandatory minimum for those accused of
first-time possession of crack cocaine, a legal loophole that
made excessive sentencing in drug cases possible for many years.
But the FSA law had no retroactive effect, leaving about 9,000
low-level felons behind bars who were sentenced before 2010 for
drug-related crimes.

Harsh penalties for drug offenders is an echo of the legal battle
to constrain cocaine epidemic in 1980s, which resulted in
disproportionately tough punishment for drug offenders.

Another peculiarity in the cocaine issue was that crack cocaine
drug abusers were primarily black US citizens, whereas those who
consumed the drug in powder form, had tendency to be mostly
white. The crack smokers were usually convicted to longer prison
terms.

“These defendants were properly held accountable for their
criminal conduct,” Cole acknowledged, “However, some of
them, simply because of the operation of sentencing laws on the
books at the time, received substantial sentences that are
disproportionate to what they would receive today.”

The new clemency criteria would be applied to inmates of solely
federal prisons. A source cited by Cole estimated the number of
such inmates as approximately 23,000.

Yet the situation in US state prisons is no good either, as the
capacity of correctional institutions has been long since
exceeded to a disastrous level.

For example, prisons in Nebraska are running at 155 percent of
capacity as of the end of March 2014.

Prisons are also overpopulated in California, where courts have
already ruled the authorities to reduce the number of prisoners
to 137.5 percent of the originally intended capacity, but only by
February 2016, when the state is obliged to have no more than
112,164 inmates in 34 correctional facilities.

Given the overwhelming excess of prisoners in the US federal
penitentiaries, there is little wonder that the Justice
Department's budget is bulging at the seams, as billions are
spent on confinement of those who offended the law, even though
many of them could only do wrong to themselves by drug abuse.

The Justice Department's allocation for the federal prison system increased
from $5 billion in 2008 to $6.9 billion today. Of that total,
$2.5 billion is meant for inmate programs such as drug treatment,
‘psychology services’, and $435 million for food services.

In a report last year the US inspector general warned of a
“growing crisis” over prison expenditures that threatens other
law enforcement priorities.

Activists from such organizations as Families Against Mandatory
Minimums and the Sentencing Project believe that despite the
narrowness of the new clemency criteria, it could help focus the
attention of Congress on expanding legislation to cut short
mandatory sentences for nonviolent drug-related crimes.

“It seems the Justice Department is doing what it can to help
stem the tide of people going to prison in record numbers for
absurd lengths of time,” told AP Julie Stewart, president of
Families Against Mandatory Minimums. “It really is up to
Congress to take the next step and change the number of mandatory
sentencing laws,” she said.

Prisonland

The number of the prisoners in America sums up to a quarter of
the world’s total, AP reports.

Starting from the late 1970s, the US prison population has been
growing along with government spending. Today about one in 100 of
Americans is serving time.

The number of Americans incarcerated in federal prisons
throughout the country has increased by nearly 30 percent over the past 10
years, according to a new report by an investigative arm of
Congress.

The US federal custody currently incarcerates about 216,000
inmates, at least half of whom ended up in prison for
drug-related crimes.

These statistics also extend beyond drugs and offenders: one in
28 children in America has a parent serving time for drug
trafficking.

That explains why the US Attorney General Eric Holder is advocating shorter prison sentences for less serious
drug trafficking offenses. This could dramatically cut US federal
prison spending and herald the beginning of a new justice system.

Today nearly half of the African-American men who
grow up in the United States are arrested at least once by the
time they hit their 23rd birthday, according to a new landmark
study that set out to examine biases within the criminal justice
system.

According to the latest reports from Global Research, the
Center for Research on Globalization, there are approximately 2
million inmates in state, federal and private prisons throughout
the US, most of the inmates are Black and Hispanic.

Many of the incarcerated are forced to work for various American
industries “for a pittance.” They are paid some 25 cents an hour
under threat of being locked in isolation cells.